Love in the Present Tense

Leonard is an eerily wise five-year-old boy with the ability to captivate everyone he meets. Pearl is Leonard's devoted teenage mother, desperately trying to hide a violent secret from her past. Mitch is Leonard's 25-year-old next-door neighbour. One day, Pearl drops Leonard off with Mitch, and never returns. As truth and fiction, memory and dreams collide, Mitch finds himself learning from a surprising source the true, magical definition of love.

I find it hard to find books that really engage me. So much of the time I feel like I am churning through average, forgettable stories. But here I stumble across this author who writes books that engage me and keep me wanting more. I have read or listened to most of her books and am yet to be disappointed. Each story is different. There's no formula that she repeats which makes each story unique. Her characters are so real. It is not deep, introspective, navel pondering literature. It is real life depicting characters you almost feel like you know.The audible versions are also so well narrated.

Heft

Forrmer academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career - if he can untangle himself from his family drama.

The Casual Vacancy

When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early 40s, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty facade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils.... Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen.

I kept waiting for something to actually happen in the story - to no avail. Introduces new characters every 5 minutes to no effect. I couldn't finish it. I went in with open eyes - not expecting anything like HP but still very disappointed.

Fated Love

What do you do when your carefully planned life takes a wrong turn into hell? When Quinn Maguire, a dashing young trauma surgeon, unaccountably accepts a position as an ER physician, her new boss, Honor Blake, suspects that Quinn is hiding a dark secret. While the two declare an uneasy truce in an effort to work together, both struggle with mutual, and unexpected, attraction.

Abducted: Lizzy Gardner, Book 1

Escaping from a madman should have been the end of her nightmare. Instead it was only the beginning...Lizzy Gardner was just seventeen when she was kidnapped by the psychopath known as Spiderman, a serial killer terrorizing her California hometown. Imprisoned and tormented for months, Lizzy narrowly escaped with her life and Spiderman vanished without a trace. But if she thought he would forget her, she was dead wrong.

Second Glance

An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property.

Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage

At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe - a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. (Both survivors of difficult divorces. Enough said.) But providence intervened one day in the form of the U.S. government.

Brilliant book. Feels like it was written for me. I am married and have always questioned marriage, wondered about history of the thing. This book delves into the history of marriage, the way it varies in cultures and countries, why we do it and what it all means. Now I just need Elizabeth Gilbert to have children so she can answer all my questions about raising children and motherhood.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One of the Fifty Shades Trilogy

When literature student Anastasia Steele interviews successful entrepreneur Christian Grey, she finds him very attractive and deeply intimidating. Convinced that their meeting went badly, she tries to put him out of her mind – until he turns up at the store where she works part-time, and invites her out. Unworldly and innocent, Ana is shocked to find she wants this man. And, when he warns her to keep her distance, it only makes her want him more.

If you are a 20 year old girl who like, speaks, like, omg, you know in that teenage american way you may like it. As a nearly 40 year old it was embarrassing! If this girl blushes one more time or trips over falling on her face one more time I shall scream. It is a Mills and Boons for teenagers. Maybe it was just the narrators voice. Maybe reading the book would be better. I don't think so. The target audience is definately late teenagers early 20s.

Has Fifty Shades of Grey turned you off from other books in this genre?

If I had known it was a Mills and Boons genre I wouldn't have read it.

What didn’t you like about Becca Battoe’s performance?

Shocking. That is as a 40 year old. If I was 18 I would probably have loved it.

Any additional comments?

For anyone over the age of 22 don't waste your money.

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